Education Commissioner Librera recommends to the Legislature
that Salem City be designated as a special needs Abbott school district

In a decision released today, Education Commissioner William L. Librera
recommends to the state Legislature that the Salem City School District
be accorded special needs status and that it should be designated as an
Abbott district under the Comprehensive Educational Improvement and Financing
Act of 1996, the states school funding law known as CEIFA.

The Commissioners decision was in the so-called Bacon case in which
an Administrative Law Judge ruled that five southern New Jersey school
districts should receive special needs designations. The five districts
were Buena Regional, Commercial Township, Fairfield, Salem City and Woodbine.

The decision states, "Salem, to a degree not evidenced by any other
petitioner in this matter, displays not only extreme poverty, but also
the multiplicity of pervasive, durable social ills that rendered the Abbott
districts incapable, for so many years, of providing constitutional levels
of education to their students absent extraordinary remedy."

"The Commissioner cannot ignore that Salem City failed monitoring
in 1990, and that it has, since 1995, remained in Level II status, with
all of the assistance and intervention that classification entails,"
the decision continues. "Thus, although the district has been the
subject of intensive Department scrutiny for the entire period since CEIFAs
enactment and has received a considerable influx of funds, it has still
been unable to provide T&E."

The Commissioner, in the decision, concludes that existing statutory
remedies will not be sufficient to enable Salem City School District to
meet its constitutional mandate to provide its students a thorough and
efficient system of public education (T&E) and that CEIFA should be
amended to include Salem City in its definition of "Abbott district"
to entitle the district to the remedial benefits flowing from Abbott status.